Efficient utilization of clinical examination rooms is increasingly a challenge for clinics and hospitals. The demand for outpatient examination rooms, physicians, nurses and other staff that are directly involved in using or managing the examination room also expands. This critical trend forces management of clinics and hospitals to consider making major staff or facility expansions and/or capital expenditure decisions. These decisions, however, often are made without solid information on how their examination rooms are being used, e.g., how long patients are waiting for a room to become available, how long it has been since housekeeping was notified that a room needs cleaning or maintenance, and so forth.
Without solid information concerning the manner in which examination rooms are being used, the administration of a clinic or hospital lacks detailed information concerning facility utilization. As a result, multi-million dollar decisions cannot be rationalized as to whether or not another facility needs to be built, whether or not more staff needs to be hired and for what areas, and whether or not rooms can be reallocated or reconfigured at some facilities from one use to another. For example, can a room be re-allocated from oncology to cardiology? From cardiology to podiatry? From office space to exam rooms?
Many institutional actors, such as patients, physicians, nurses, receptionists, housekeeping and maintenance interact with an examination room. The coordination of all the activities, as it pertains to an examination room (that is, patient transport, patient examination, clean up, and equipment repairs), is not typically a data-driven series of events. Without hard data, however, medical staff, housekeeping and maintenance staff and administrators are hampered in their ability to make intelligent decisions on how the assets and resources are most effectively utilized.
For patients, present facility uses often mean that patients are not transported as quickly as otherwise might be possible to available examination rooms. Frequently, personnel select an exam or procedure room by searching for an empty room on foot walking down a corridor. Patients often experience unnecessarily long wait times for physicians and nurses through improper or inefficient room utilization.
It is desirable to provide a system that enables hospitals and clinics to maximize efficient utilization of examination rooms, saving time and money, improving the overall use of human and financial resources, and improving the patient experience.